


A Fire Between

by thecutteralicia



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, Child Abuse, Childhood, Childhood Memories, Childhood Sexual Abuse, Childhood Trauma, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Kid Mycroft, Memories, Mycroft-centric, Pre-Canon, Random & Short, S3 compliant, Sexual Abuse, Short One Shot, mummy is awesome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-15
Updated: 2014-09-15
Packaged: 2018-02-17 13:44:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,859
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2311700
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thecutteralicia/pseuds/thecutteralicia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Mycroft was a child, something terrible happened. The worst thing. </p><p>"This is why I don't have friends," he wants to tell Sherlock. "Do you understand?"</p><p>He will never tell Sherlock this.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Fire Between

_“In this story of the outside world and the inside world with a fire between, the outside world of little screw-ups recedes now for a few hours to be taken over by the inside world of blowups, this time by a colossal blowup.”_ -Norman Maclean, **Young Men and Fire**

**I.**

Mycroft is most surprised about which details he remembers, so many years later.

He remembers the warmth of the sun on his bare arms, the chattering sound the chickens made, the far away sound of cars honking on the road in the distance and how someone in a nearby house was playing the radio.

He remembers sitting on the wooden steps of a house two roads down from his own, idly drawing in the dirt with a stick he'd found. He was hot and sweaty and thinking about how much he hated Honduras. He'd just tried to join a footie game with the local children, but they'd rebuffed him. He was too pale, too English and too uncoordinated for them. They'd laughed.

He was thinking about how he missed rain.

Mycroft didn't hear the footsteps until the sandal-clad feet appeared in front of him, but he remembers looking up and seeing the blue of the man's shirt and his dirty khakis, cut off at the knees, and his sunglasses and his blond curls.

"Hi. I'm Tommy. What's your name?" The man said.

He seemed nice. Mycroft remembers that.

 **II.**

Mycroft was jolted by the Yorkshire accent, so far from home. 

"What's your name?" the man asked again.

"Mycroft."

"Well, that's a mouthful, innit?"

Mycroft's jaw tightened. "If two syllables are a 'mouthful' to you."

"Hold on, no need to get prickly." The man - Tommy - held his hands up. "It's just an unusual name, that's all. Never heard it before."

"It's my great uncle's. He was quite an accomplished chemist." Mycroft straightened his back as he said that. "You've probably never heard of him, but he's quite well known in England."

"Well, that's alright then."

Mycroft's brief moment of pride vanished. He slouched and put his chin on his knees and went back to drawing pattern-less shapes in the dirt.

After a moment, the man called Tommy sat down on the steps next to him and pulled a cigarette pack from his pocket. "And how old are you, Mycroft?"

"Nine."

"Why aren't you playing with those other kids, then?" 

"I don't like football," Mycroft said, which was half-true. 

"So what are you doing here?" Tommy worked a cigarette from his pack and lit it.

"Sitting. Drawing in the dirt."

Tommy smiled. "I meant here, in Honduras."

"My dad is a doctor. He's helping people. What are _you_ doing here?"

Tommy laughed. "Boy, you're a cranky one, aren't you?"

"You're the one asking questions."

"So I am." He stretched his legs out in front of him. "Well, Mycroft, I help people, too."

"By doing what?"

"A little bit of everything. Getting them food, teaching their kids, helping them build houses. Things like that."

"A missionary?" Mycroft didn't abide religion, but remembered his mother's admonition to be polite about it. 

"Something like that, but not quite." 

"Oh." Mycroft's stick dragged in the dirt.

Tommy smoked in silence for a moment. "Why do you look so glum, then?" he finally asked.

Mycroft looked over at him. Tommy's skin was a lovely sun-kissed golden color, and he was lean but muscular. _Rather lovely,_ Mycroft thought, then looked quickly away.

"None of your business," he mumbled, the tips of his ears red.

"I suppose not." Tommy smoothly flicked ash off his cigarette. "I just thought it was nice, seeing a fellow Englishman around and all."

 **III.**

Mycroft doesn't remember how it came up, but Tommy asked him to have lunch, and Mycroft said yes, but he had to ask his mum first.

"Come on," Tommy urged. "My place is just over there. Do you really have to ask your mum if you can walk ten feet and have a bite with a friend?"

"I'm not your friend," Mycroft said. 

"You could be." Tommy smiled. "If you have lunch with me." 

Mycroft ducked his head in flattered embarrassment.

"But if you have to go home first, I don't really have the time to wait around..."

He looked at Tommy, this stranger, so golden and grown up and who wanted his company for some reason, _Mycroft's_ company. 

"No, of course not. I'm not a baby."

"Course not," Tommy smiled, and stubbed out his cigarette.

Tommy did lead him to a small, crudely built bungalow about twenty feet down the road, and Mycroft remembers thinking that it was surprisingly barren for something someone lived in.

Then Tommy closed the door, and it got quite dark. The only sunlight came through the filmy cloth that was pinned over the paneless windows.

"Sit down," Tommy said, gesturing to a battered looking red sofa. The cushions looked filthy, but Mycroft willed himself to sit down anyway. Inside the room, the road noises seemed much more distant.

Tommy sat next him, so close their legs were touching. Mycroft tried to move over, but there was no room. The arm of the sofa was blocking him in on the other side.

"What are we going to eat?" Mycroft asked, because this place was only one room and he didn't see any kitchen things.

Tommy didn't answer him. "Tell me, Mycroft, do you have a lot of mates here?"

"Not really," Mycroft said, trying to shift in his seat.

"Well, I think we could be mates." Tommy leaned close. "Do you think so?"

Mycroft's heart was thudding rather loudly in his ears. "I don't know."

"I think we could be. I think I could be your mate. Do you like me, Mycroft?"

Mycroft stared straight ahead. "I don't know you."

"I think you do like me." Then Tommy's hand was on his arm.

"I have to go," Mycroft blurted out, and he wanted to, but the arm of the sofa was digging into his side and the light was hazy and red through the curtains and Tommy's hand was still on his arm. 

"I'm not supposed to be here," Mycroft said softly.

It all went so quickly then. Mycroft remembers how cool Tommy's palm was, and wondering how it could be so cool when everything else there was so hot.

He remembers the weight of Tommy's body on his, and how it was practically crushing him and made it difficult to breathe.

He remembers feeling very, very small.

"Sshh," Tommy said during it, his breath hot on Mycroft's face.

And then after, so casually, "Now don't go saying anything to anyone about this, alright?"

Mycroft didn't say anything in reply. Couldn't. He concentrated on pulling his pants and trousers up, but his hands were shaking and he couldn't button them.

"After all, we're mates, right? Here, let me get that." Tommy calmly reached over and did up Mycroft's trousers for him and that, somehow, was the worst thing of all.

On the walk home, Mycroft stopped and threw up.

**V.**

He must've looked how he felt, because the moment Mummy saw him she was on her feet, putting the baby back in his playpen.

"Mycroft! You look a fright! Are you feeling okay?"

"No," he choked out.

He was immediately enveloped in her arms and her hand was on his forehead.

"No fever," she mumbled, because Mycroft knew fevers were what you checked for first in a place like this. 

"Come on, let's get you to bed," she said, but Mycroft doesn't remember anything after that until he was actually in bed and Mum was wiping his face with a cool, damp flannel.

"I think it's this heat," she said. "And you running around all day. I think you've got a bit of heat exhaustion, and no wonder."

She started humming idly while she continued to wipe his face and hair, and the water was so cool, and the tears clogging his throat were so hot that he just couldn't, just couldn't, and suddenly the sobs broke forth from his chest and he was crying and crying and crying and couldn't stop. 

"Sweetheart," Mummy mumbled into his hair, because Mycroft was gripping the front of her shirt in his fists as she held him and rubbed his back.

"Sweetheart," she kept saying, "What's wrong?"

And then he told her.

 **VI.**

Mummy's eyes clouded over as he spoke, and when he finished, she got a steely sort of look on her face, the same look she always had when she got very cross.

"Are you mad at me?" Mycroft asked softly. He didn't think he'd done anything wrong, but he couldn't be sure, because everything felt wrong and he couldn't find himself at that moment, in all that wrongness. 

Mummy took his face in both her hands and said, "You did _nothing_ wrong," as if answering his own thoughts. "Do not think, ever, that you did anything wrong, Mycroft Holmes. Do you understand me?"

He nodded.

"I am very furious right now at the person who did this to you," she continued, looking deeply into his eyes. "I am so furious that I don't know what I might do. But not, for one fraction of a second, could I be angry at you. I'm so very proud of you for telling me, in fact. And Daddy will feel the same way. Neither of us could ever be angry at you for being hurt, but we'll be mad at the person who hurt you. Do you understand the difference?"

Mycroft nodded again.

The following days were fragments.

He remembers falling asleep in Mummy's arms that night, eventually, then being woken by a hushed conversation between her and Dad in the other room.

He remembers Dad, coming to check on him, with red eyes, like he'd been crying.

He remembers the hospital, telling them about the phantom man whose name was probably not actually Tommy and blue shirts and Yorkshire accents and then telling it all again to a police officer, and walking him and his parents to the bungalow nearby the next day, which was of course empty, as Mycroft somehow knew it would be.

"We'll find him," Mycroft heard the police officer say. "He probably went into Tegucigalpa. We'll find him." (They did not, Mycroft learned much later.)

Mycroft remembers how Mummy slept in his bed with him until they left the next week, and the hot asphalt of the tarmac under his feet. (His last memory of Honduras.) 

On the plane ride back to England, Dad sat in the next row, the baby dozing in his lap. Mummy sat next to Mycroft and started talking about her studies in combustion, and about flash points, how they're very brief and can't last without the ignition source.

"But fire points," she explained. "Fire points can last for a long time, even after you remove the source of ignition. I think life's like that, sometimes. Do you?"

Mycroft remembers that he looked out the window at the ocean below as she said that, and thought about all the things that could burn out of control, so quickly.


End file.
